GENEVA, SWITZERLAND-- The European Broadcast Union, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the Video Services Forum have formed a Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) to stimulate new business opportunities through the exchange of professional media across networks, exploiting affordable IT-based technology.
The Task Force will define a strategy to develop a packet-based network infrastructure for the professional media industry by bringing together manufacturers, broadcasters, standards bodies and trade associations with the objective to create, store, transfer and stream professional media. The Task Force’s primary objective is to ensure interoperability in packet-based systems (networking, equipment and software) for professional media. This will mean defining an agile, on-demand, packet-based network infrastructure that supports a variety of distributed, automated, professional media (file- and stream-based) workflows for local, regional and global standards-based production, supporting any format, to reduce cost of ownership and content time-to-market.
The Task Force will take a leading role, coordinating the activities of its members and of constituent and allied organizations. It will adopt a three-phase approach to its mission and objectives, with each phase used as a gate for assessing whether sufficient progress has been made before advancing.
The three phases are:
1. Define the business-driven use cases and requirements
2. Define the framework and reference architecture
3. Define and coordinate tasks required to realize the output of phases 1 and 2
The JT-NM sprang from a meeting at Turner Broadcasting System in Atlanta in March, between representatives of the EBU, SMPTE, VSF and the Advanced Media Work Flow Association, as well as business technologists from major media and manufacturing companies.
